I’ve been on a decades-long mission to push back against all the misrepresentations of single people as sad and lonely losers, and to showcase more accurate portrayals of how real single people often live meaningful and fulfilling lives. As part of my quest to slay singlism and bring matrimania to its knees, I have been sharing the stories of single-minded change agents who are inspired by the same passions. They have already made great strides in challenging marital status discrimination and highlighting stories of the good single life.

[This post was originally published at Psychology Today. I just discovered that it disappeared! I have no idea why, but I thought I’d just republish it at my own site where I have control over what appears and disappears.]

In my previous post, I explained why no study has ever shown definitively that getting married causes people to become happier – and no study ever will. Here, I will critique the research (an unpublished working paper by Grover and Helliwell) that set off the latest round of matrimaniacal claims that we single people would be happier if only we would get married. The claims the authors are making are unapologetically causal: They think their research shows that getting married causes people to become happier. It doesn’t. The very premise of their claim (that married people are happier, and we just need to figure out if marriage is causing married people’s greater happiness) is undermined by some of their own findings – not that you would have read much about those results in any of the many media stories gleefully declaring a win for Team Marriage.

I have been scrutinizing the research on single parents and their children for more than a decade. I’ve learned lots of things, but perhaps the most important one is this: all those predictions you hear about how the children of single parents are doomed are grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong.

Some years back, there was a time when I was getting so many comments and emails from single people who were not feeling welcome in their places of worship that I started a series of posts on the topic. I wrote an introduction to the series, and then each post after that began with the question, “Which religions are welcoming to singles?” and continued with the answers from a particular religion. I didn’t write anything but the introduction – I don’t have the expertise. Instead, I invited people with expertise in different religions to answer some of the questions that readers of my Singled Out book and my Psychology Today blog had been asking me. As you will see below, I got answers from people with expertise in Judaism, Christian ministries, and Catholicism.

[This article is co-authored – in alphabetical order – by Lisa Arnold, Rachel Buddeberg, Christina Campbell, and Bella DePaulo. We are cross-posting it on all of our blogs.]

“White privilege” and “male privilege” are familiar concepts in our cultural conversations. There is, however, another vast swath of unearned privileges that have gone largely unrecognized, even though they unfairly advantage about half of the adult population in the United States. We’re talking about marital privileges. People who marry enjoy social, cultural, economic, and political advantages that single people do not, simply because they are married.